So I’ve been doing a little testing in a small, isolated case but I’m not yet sure whether this scales well. Maybe someone here already knows the answer.
I had the feeling that declaring a variable, even if you never actually assign to it, is a process that costs cycles and as such if you are in a section of the code that is called frequently (at approx 1/60th of a second) that this common convention:
function update(delta:Number):void{
var importantNumber:Number;
var importantInt:int;
var importantObject:ImportantObject;
var point:Point;
}
would perform worse than this uncommon convention
private var importantNumber:Number;
private var importantInt:int;
private var importantObject:ImportantObject;
private var point:Point;
function update(delta:Number):void{
// look ma', no declarations in the stack frame.
}
Very small-scale testing bears this out, but I’m curious whether this scales well. Would going the second route save you cycles on declaring variables while costing you in other ways (possibly in terms of cache misses)? Has anyone here tried this out in a fully-fledged application or game?
